Durruti, Ascaso and ‘Combina’ were arrested on Sunday 2 April 1933 as they left the Andalusia-Extremadura Regional Congress. The grounds offered for this action by the police were as follows: they were “to answer for the criminal notions they had voiced at the closing rally”[1], which is to say, a thought crime and this was a breach of the most fundamental freedom of personal expression.

On Sunday 9 April in Barcelona, the leading lights of Estat Català (EC) and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), assembled to pay tribute to the fascist Josep Dencàs who at the time was their Health Minister, believed that the arrests in Seville had decapitated the FAI and that said organisation could now be regarded as a dead duck. This was wishful thinking, the sort of thing regularly encountered among those running the bourgeois apparatus of repression when they seek to boil complex, deep-seated social and political issues to specific or run-of-the-mill “terrorist” and public order issues embodied by a few leaders or scapegoats. Josep Dencàs had, with the Badía brothers, been one of the main founders and sponsors of the pro-(Catalan)independence fascist escamots of the JEREC (Juventudes de Esquerra Republicana-Estat Català — Esquerra Republicana-Estat Català Youth)

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Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary